Typography rant

I’m a regular reader on Stylegala, a website dedicated to css / web standards and design. It’s a great site. In fact my site was featured on it in August. On every entry on Stylegala you can comment on the sites featured. I had a quick look today and came across a comment thread which annoyed me so much I had to write about it here! The thread in question is the one about the site Epocrates. David at Stylegala gives it a pretty good writeup, but he is disagreed with, quite strongly, in the thread of comments. Have a read of them.

It got me worked up again about the state of the industry’s general understanding, and working knowledge of, correct typography. Occasionally I have a rant about this sort of thing, and today’s rant is not really any different from the others. It all began with a comment by some bloke called ‘beavis’ ...

OK maybe I should have added more. I have seen hundreds of sites like this. I cant see what makes this special. Its anything but original. Why say it’s good typography when it is absolutely awful typography? Please go to sites like misprinted type for excellent typography and look up the definition of the term.

I took his advice and had a look at misprintedtype. It’s ok, although nothing new. The typography is really quite dated - I remember all of Ed Fella’s work from ten years ago, this stuff hasn’t progressed much from that. So, in short I really disagree with his comments. It shows a real lack of understanding of typography, and more importantly of the tradition from which it was born. How can designers like this have so little respect for this? I just don’t get it.